I've seen lots of old phones with shot mouthpieces. In my experience, the Schrack mouthpieces used in Austrian phones go bad much more often than the earpieces.
I have about every model that was released by our GPO from 1948 onwards wired as extensions. These are Kapsch or Schrack (2 companies that had more or less a monopoly on phone equipment) W48 (wall or desk phone, available in chamois (yellowish white) and black, I only got the desk phone, and a color that officially didn't exist, caramel.)
W74 (wall and desk phone in chamois, light grey and desk phone in a beautiful dark red, _very_ rare. I have the chamois and grey desk phone and a chamois wall phone)
W80 (available in various colors, with rotary dial, I got a Post Office yellow one), TAP 80 (keypad, without redial and similar extra functions, same colors as W80)
TAP 80K (touchtone dial with redial etc., still in widespread use, the wall phone looked like W74 with keypad),
TAP90 (flat, modern phone, all electronic) and T95 (today's phone, very flat, ugly dark grey with green keypad).
I grew up with a chamois W74 party line phone, until 1992 when we got digital switching and a blue TAP 80K plus a red TAP 90 on an extension.
Now I've got a black W48 on my desk, and when I'm really busy working on my computer the bell almost gives me a heart attack, even though I have the phone since 1999.
Hey, it's 1920ies humor, you can't expect to be able to find out what a GPO official back then was thinking! I'm not even sure if the letter sequence is actually correct, but I know it was something weird, so it could be correct.
Besides, we think the Americans are weird, probably we're just different.
You'll really like Vienna, it's a nice oldfashioned city, even though we keep getting new futuristic buildings everywhere.
One advantage some of my classmates found during their stay in NYC: You don't get decapitated when sticking your head out of an old window! *gg* (We have mostly casement windows instead of the US guillotine types, and in NYC most of us lived in rather rundown houses)
